Falkenberg: Is justice system in U.S. truly colorblind?

Updated 12:28 pm, Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Say you're a felon and my first impulse is to stop paying attention, no matter how compelling your story. Something inside my brain, and even my bleeding heart, shuts off.

I begin looking around for a more sympathetic character, somebody without the taint of the criminal label, somebody more normal, somebody more worthy. It's a hard thing to admit. And it's why the message of Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander's best-selling book hit me so hard: Criminals, as she suggests, are the one social group that even we compassionate Americans have given ourselves "permission to hate," or at least, ignore.

And, this is OK, right? Because hating criminals, even those on parole, isn't unfair; they chose their fate. It isn't illogical; it's a form of self-defense. It isn't racist; our justice system is colorblind.

But what if all of these assumptions are wrong? What if our system of justice picks and chooses which people to make criminal? What if our system of mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs, doesn't make us safer, but practically guarantees that millions of "ex-cons" forever marginalized by the criminal label are left so desperate they return to crime to survive.

And what if this system is not only prejudiced, disproportionately targeting African-Americans more than any other group, but it is just the latest manifestation of entrenched racism so profound, so repressive, and so insidious, that it's worthy of being compared to slavery and Jim Crow?

That's what Alexander will argue Tuesday when she speaks to the Progressive Forum at the Wortham Center about her book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

Who will be there

It should be required reading for anyone who makes criminal justice policy, or enforces it, or cares about it, in this state.

And the Harris County district attorney candidate who returned my call, Republican Mike Anderson, promised it's on his reading list. I have to wonder if it will change his mind about wanting to dismantle DA Pat Lykos' policy against prosecuting trace drug cases.

Locked up, locked out

Alexander describes a system of justice, or perhaps injustice, that "locks up and locks out" black Americans in a "redesigned" system of racial control that can't be explained away by crime rates.

Blackness, she says, has become conflated with criminal.

The conspiracy element of her theory is a hard sell. She faults the Reagan administration for exploiting the crack epidemic in the 1980s to build support for the drug war.

But it's hard to argue with the staggering statistics and cast-iron analysis on the devastating effects of the drug war on African-Americans.

In a phone interview last week, Alexander said that when she speaks to mostly white audiences with little experience in the criminal justice system there's an "initial stage of shock and disbelief."

They're shocked to learn, for instance, that in large urban areas today, more than half of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are subject to legal discrimination for the rest of their lives, in employment, housing, access to education and to public benefits.

Voting rights lost

They must forever check the "felon" box on applications for jobs, apartments they know they'll never get.

And, Alexander writes, less than two decades after the drug war began, one in seven black men nationally had lost the right to vote.

For those who would question if blacks really have it worse than poor whites, Alexander notes that black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than 13 times higher than white men.

Ghettos, not campuses

This is despite the fact that, for decades, studies have shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell drugs than whites. Discretion and racial bias lead police to ghettos, Alexander writes, not college campuses.

It's a hard message to hear, especially in Texas, which Alexander calls "the birth place of mass incarceration." She's heard of the substantial reforms Whitmire and others have fought to implement to reduce the prison population by emphasizing treatment and rehabilitation.

"I have some hope that despite the fact that Texas got us into this mess," Alexander told me, "that people of conscience in Texas who are committed to racial and social justice will help us blaze a path that will lead toward the dismantling of racial incarceration nationwide."

That will only happen if we start paying attention. This book is a start.